


As it is convenient, let us believe

by orphan_account



Series: There will be a fish [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Slash, mythology meta, slight canon deviance, there will be a fish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-22
Updated: 2012-11-22
Packaged: 2017-11-19 06:09:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/570056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek is weird, Scott is weird, and Stiles has always been a complete mythology nut. The Greeks never really taught him how to deal with werewolves, though. </p>
<p>Alternatively: It would be easy to tell who’d been sticking an inhaler in their mouth if you had freaky wolf senses, Stiles is like 99% sure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As it is convenient, let us believe

Stiles knows, intellectually, that Derek and Laura Hale didn’t die in the fire. Everyone knows they didn’t die in the fire; it was the only thing the town could talk about for weeks after the Hale funeral (things, admittedly, were quieter back then). But they disappeared so soon after the fire took their family that Stiles thought about the fire as the death of all of the Hales. 

When he sees Derek again that day in the woods, it’s like seeing a ghost. For a moment he’s even convinced he’s hallucinating the form in front of him, but Stiles is pretty sure even his imagination isn’t that active because he can tell it’s Derek but it doesn’t really look like him. He can see how that quiet, surly teenager would grow into this foreboding man in terms of his features – the Hales were a good looking bunch, just in general, it was a hard conclusion to avoid drawing – but it seems... Stiles never really knew him, obviously, there were always those five years stretched between them like so many oceans, but he seems off. He looks off. 

Derek looks… disconnected.

Well, he looks pissed, but he looks. Like there’s nothing in him at all, except how pissed he is. And that – Derek was never the most pleasant of the Hales, right, but he never looked like that, like the only way he could stand was by snarling.

“Dude, that was Derek Hale. You remember, right? He’s only like a few years older than us,” Stiles says after Derek is a bit out of earshot, looking incredulously at the inhaler he threw at them. 

“Remember what?” Scott asks, because he’s Scott, and even though the fire is burned into the town’s memory there is a real possibility his best friend managed to forget about it anyway.

“His family? They all burned to death in a fire like ten years ago,” Stiles says. It’s wrong, though, it was closer to five years; he knows because it happened when his mom was sick and it was one of the few things that managed to permeate the bubble they built around themselves, like it would hurt less if no one else could see. In some ways, they were right. His mother’s death was quiet – intimate, almost; the whispers came and went within days, though the sympathy lingered for years. The sympathy, sometimes, he can still feel on the back of his neck in the grocery store. He understands why Derek and his sister left, honestly. Sometimes, he wonders why he and his dad didn’t, and their tragedy wasn’t loud and explosive and all-consuming like the Hales’s was. Even if sometimes it still feels like it was.

“Wonder what he’s doing back?” Scott says after a moment, distant, and Stiles makes an incredulous noise and shrugs. 

“C’mon,” he says, tugging at Scott’s arm, and they turn around and start out the same way they came in. “He didn’t,” Stiles says a few minutes later, stops himself, keeps walking.

“What, Stiles?”

“Nothing,” he says, shakes his head. “He just. Derek didn’t look… I mean, he looked pissed as hell. Like. Way more pissed than a little bit of trespassing warrants.” Scott turns to look at him, but then shifts his gaze to the ground again. He doesn’t say anything, and Stiles, for once, doesn’t either. It’s probably the quietest they’ve ever been together that didn’t involve detention or sleeping since they met when they were six, but Stiles’s mind is too busy elsewhere to be bothered by it. It’s a busy place in general, his brain, but right now there are two related but singularly interesting things fluttering around in it – the closed off look on Derek’s face coupled with the smell of ash on the one hand and Scott’s inhaler confidently tossed to them on the other. 

“How’d he know it was your inhaler, dude?” he asks as they pile into his Jeep. Scott stares at him.

“I dunno,” he says helpfully, and Stiles shakes his head and puts the key in the ignition.

“It was weird, Scott,” Stiles says, and he pulls out of his parking spot and heads up the road.

\------

Seriously. It’s too weird.

He doesn’t think about why he does it (or at least he doesn’t acknowledge it, which is the same basic premise as far as he’s concerned), but that night, Stiles pulls out the bestiary and flips to the story of Lycaon, sifting through his notes and whispering to himself; “Stiles, you’ve gone over the fucking deep end.” But he keeps looking, and then he turns to his computer and ventures outside of the Greek stories he knows so well and looks for the legend named for the first wolf-man who terrorized and killed. Stiles is always too-aware of everything around him not to synthesize and look for patterns. And they’re all there, right in front of him. Scott has been weird for the last few days – Stiles knows him well enough to know he’s not on steroids, but Jackson’s question wasn’t for nothing. He’s stronger, his senses are keener, and he’s – there’s no other way to put it – getting progressively more testy and weirder the closer the moon creeps toward a complete, bright circle. 

On its own, that combination of facts would probably make Stiles consider locking himself in an insane asylum if he jumped right to PROBABLY A WEREWOLF, LET’S BE HONEST. It’s not just that, though. Scott told him about the wolf in the forest, and there just aren’t wolves this far south in California. There probably aren’t even any wolves at the very tippy top of California. And, to be honest, he’s thinking a lot about Derek, and even the rest of the Hales. Sure, Stiles remembered who Derek was – but there’s no reason for Derek to remember who Scott was, and certainly no reason for him to recognize him after he went through puberty. So even though his name was on the inhaler, there’s no reason Derek could have known it was his. Teenagers in a forest – they could have been looking for anything. Derek’s first thought should probably have been kids skipping class to smoke up, but instead he tossed them Scott’s inhaler. How?

It would be easy to tell who’d been sticking an inhaler in their mouth if you had freaky wolf senses, Stiles is like 99% sure. Maybe he smelled it on Scott, or something. 

And Stiles thinks about Laura and Derek and their two older brothers who never moved away even though they were both smart and handsome and probably needed something bigger than Beacon Hills, and he thinks about the four cousins and aunt and uncle he can think of off the top of his head that lived in the old Hale House on top of Derek’s already fairly large immediate family. He thinks about how tight-knit they were, how they were socially completely average except that every friend, even in the height of teenagerdom, took second place to any family. Always. He thinks about how Mrs. Hale put her hand on his shoulder in the grocery store and told him she was sorry to hear about his mom before the gossip really got started about her cancer. It would have been a toss away event, honestly, but Stiles remembers it because she was the first person who said anything that he or his father didn’t personally tell. 

The puzzle is big and complicated and the solution is ridiculous. There’s no way anyone would look at the research Stiles has been doing and line it up side-by-side with the evidence he has and say yes, that’s definitely it. There’s no other explanation. But Stiles lines up everything he knows and draws every line he can think of between every variable and he remembers the faith his mom had in myth, tries to pull from within himself the level of faith he has in the stories Ovid wrote so many thousands of years ago, and he comes up with this: 

Scott is a werewolf. And so is Derek Hale, and probably so was the rest of the Hale family.

There’s a plan for everything, but Stiles doesn’t have a plan for this. He picks up his phone and pushes speed dial two, and as Scott picks up on the second ring, he says, “Dude, I have to talk to you.”

\------

In retrospect, Stiles wishes he’d grown an unnatural attachment to medieval mythology as a kid. Or even Latin mythology. Because after Lycaon, the first werewolf (not coincidentally, as far as Stiles is concerned, a gigantic murderous and possibly cannibalistic asshole if you went with Ovid’s version of the story, and Stiles always went with Ovid because, dude, Ovid, he knew his stuff), the Greeks pretty much stopped giving a shit about them.

“Seriously, bro. If you turned into a Griffin or something I’d be on this,” he tells Scott once he’s sure they’re not having some sort of crazy joint-hallucination.

“What’s a Griffin?” Scott asks, which. Of course.

“C’mon! Body of a lion, head and wings of an eagle? They were ferocious as hell and guarded gold? Or, well, they made their nests out of gold because it was shiny and protected the baby Griffins from gold thieves, depending on your lore, but regardless, they killed the crap out of gold thieves is what they did, and they were awesome at it, and if you were a Griffin I could totally handle it and know what to do. But you’re a freakin’ werewolf, man, and all I knew about werewolves before this research binge was that Zeus turned Lycaon into a wolf and then the dude went and massacred his town in a fit of bloodlust that was probably more his natural human disposition than the power of the wolf, and then Zeus killed him because he didn’t learn his lesson and was evil. Alternatively – ”

“Shut up, Stiles,” Scott says, and he looks about as torn as Stiles feels. Except while Stiles is torn between freaking out and freaking the fuck out, Scott looks torn between freaking out and laughing at him. At least he’s helping someone, here.

“I’m just saying! Does it help you to know that in pretty much every version of Lycaon I’ve ever read he either tried to cannibalize innocent people or sacrifice his son to Zeus for power before he turned into a wolf and subsequently died?” Stiles asks, mouth agape, because seriously. He’s out of his depths here, is what he’s trying to say, and no matter how much he loves Scott he’s pretty sure he can’t get behind Scott eating people.

“I don’t’ know how much that stuff is going to help us, dude,” Scott says, worrying his brow, and Stiles throws his hands in the air.

“That’s what I’m saying, Scott, I don’t know what you were listening to, but I was saying I don’t know how to help you.”

“But I don’t know how much that stuff was ever going to help us,” Scott goes on, looking stupidly earnest as per usual. “It’s just lies, you know?”

“So are werewolves,” Stiles says.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that one.” 

“I can’t believe I read the wrong lore to help out my best friend when he turned into a fantasy creature, I mean, really?” Stiles says, and Scott shrugs and knocks their shoulders together.

And maybe he should have expected what comes next (at least the bit where Scott being a werewolf turns out to be the worst thing that has ever happened to him instead of kind of cool, if ridiculous and freaky), but he doesn’t. He doesn’t, because this isn’t supposed to be a story about Greek mythology; it’s why Scott didn’t kill the entire town (yet, Stiles mentally amends) or try to perform a blood sacrifice like Lycaon. This is supposed to be a story where the Greeks are turned on their heads and proved to be the fools Scott, at least, always thought they were. Instead, that week they run into Derek Hale again and things start falling into place in the worst way possible and all of a sudden the Greeks are right back in Stiles’s mind, there at the forefront, saying every lie has it’s truth. Sorry we didn’t get the literal right, but the metaphorical – Stiles. Scott may have a journey ahead of him that’s full of myth and lore, but yours is, too. 

But he doesn’t see what’s coming, and he wishes he studied Latin mythology, at least. Seriously, damn.


End file.
